On a cold, blustery morning last November, I followed an abandoned railroad grade to the South Dakota and Iowa state line. I had two maps in front of me—one an annotated paper printout, a collage of colors and lines overlaid on an old topo map, and the other Google Maps, open on my phone, my blue dot tacking southwest. I wasn’t lost. I was on a trail that did not yet exist.

The route, unmarked and at points choked by trees, had been outlined to me a few days earlier by Brenda Williams, ASLA, a landscape architect and director of preservation planning at Quinn Evans Architects in Madison, Wisconsin. Williams had recently led the development of a master plan for this area, an important but not widely known archaeological site known as Blood Run. The old railway was the proposed arrival sequence.

Typically, the few visitors who came to Blood Run, which became a National Historic Landmark in 1970, parked at the top of a bluff and followed a path down to the Big Sioux River, the state border. But Williams had been explicit: Take the railroad grade. Rather than start high, Williams wanted visitors to begin in the valley, to park and walk along the creek that gives the area its name before reaching the earthen mounds that are some of the site’s more visible cultural and historic remnants. It was, in part, a practical decision: The abandoned railroad provided a level path all the way from the main road to the mound grouping. But mostly it was about being immersed in the place, bringing people into the site (more…)

We figured the cover to this year’s ASLA Awards issue would be timely, but not by a measure of days. We were thinking months and years. The project by Studio Outside of its Galveston Island State Park project, which won a 2017 ASLA Professional Award for Analysis and Planning, shows the gradual progress happening these days with the design of coastal sites given the realities of climate change. As the issue arrived in the mail the past week, Hurricane Harvey swamped Galveston and wasted a huge piece of the Texas Gulf Coast. (Zach Mortice talked to Studio Outside for LAM this weekend as the storm moved in and lingered.)

Along with Studio Outside in our September Awards issue are several dozen projects that heap brainpower on the urgent landscape priorities of today. Out of the 295 projects submitted to the Student Awards, 26 winners were chosen, and 38 Professional Awards were selected from the 465 submissions. In addition, the ASLA Honors highlight the many professional contributions recognized by the society, including the winner of this year’s Landscape Architecture Firm Award, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Louise Johns.

From “Ears to the Ground” by Timothy A. Schuler in our August 2017 issue, about the quest by Brenda Williams, ASLA, to turn the mythic Native American landscape of Blood Run into a park that stretches over two states.

“In our language, we have a word; it means, ‘They have no ears.’ They don’t listen, and that’s what was happening.”

—Marisa Miakonda Cummings, Omaha tribe member

Brenda Williams, ASLA, has been working on tribal landscapes for 20 years, but it’s what she’s learned not to do that defines her reputation: Talk first. Her work is a lesson in when and how to listen, and what to do, and not do, with what you hear. Timothy A. Schuler follows Williams as she facilitates a new master plan for Blood Run, a sacred site carved by the state lines of South Dakota and Iowa and years of exploitation. The photojournalist Louise Johns documents the land and the people.

If you don’t live in New York City, you can be forgiven for not knowing Randall’s Island. It’s not a destination park like Governors Island or a national monument like Ellis Island. It’s where the city’s residents go to play games—right up against a sewage treatment plant and some of the city’s most monumental infrastructure. After years of neglect, the playing fields and recreational amenities get a jolt of energy from MPFP, Starr Whitehouse, and Mathews Nielsen, among others.

Also in this issue: A new wetland park for Wilmington, Delaware, has layers of challenge. Jeanne Haffner explores Lawrence Halprin’s unbuilt plans for the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.; the artist Zaria Forman gives us a preview of her new series on Antarctic icebergs; and the first biography of the landscape architect James Rose asks as many questions as it answers. The full table of contents for August can be found here.